Link to lecture recording on YouTube
Date: 2025-11-10
Speaker: Clay Bavor
Speaker’s Social Profile: Website / Google Scholar / GitHub / LinkedIn / X (Twitter)
Education:
Work:
Broadly categorize agents into 3 buckets:
| Type | Scope | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Personal agent | trusted personal digital assistants | ChatGPT, Gemini |
| Role-based / persona-based agent | help get job done | coding agents, legal agents |
| Customer-facing agent |
Analogy:
Speaker’s strong view: businesses transit from multiple channels (phone, chat, email etc.) to a single agent; AI architects inside of companies build, define and shape what the agent should look like
The conversation is the interface, no app to navigate, no hierarchical menu structure to get through
Sierra introduces new business model:
1997 era: the internet has been around for a couple of years, but no one had really figured out how to build and scale web services
Sierra: moving from agents as technology to agents as product, where agents can be configured, built, kept secure etc.
Today’s agents are transactional; the best agents do not resolve cases, they build relationships with a company’s customers across multiple interactions and transactions
Agents are non-deterministic for a given input, hence deserve an entirely new approach to software development
Sierra provides platform-as-a-service, where lower level complexity is abstracted away; build once and deploy everywhere
every channel that a company interacts with its customers over is digital, and can be understood and broken down and attribute to what happened there
[Incomplete, work in progress]